Captain Hatch – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Being Human: Series 5, Episode 6–The Last Broadcast

“To desire to be human is the end, not the beginning. To want it is to have it. You’ve already won.”

Well, I’ll be damned – Toby Whithouse has managed to have his cake and eat it.

When I first wrote about Being Human’s cancellation, I was sceptical about his apparently conflicting statements that he’d given the show a definite end, but that it would “keep fans guessing”. That sounded to me like he’d been informed of the cancellation after the fact, and was trying to make excuses for leaving us with an unresolved cliffhanger.

But no – I should have had more faith in the writer who’s rapidly impressing me as one of the best fantasy scripters out there. Not only did both of those statements turn out to be true, this final ever episode managed to fulfil some very tall orders. It served as a capstone to the show’s mythology and themes, gave us an emotional sendoff for characters I really didn’t want to say goodbye to, and provided a real ending – albeit with enough ambiguity to satisfy fans who wanted a happy end and those who wanted to see our heroes go out in a blaze of apocalyptic glory. All of that, and it managed to be a gripping, tearjerking hour of television with more horror, twists and humour than I had any right to expect.

We picked up exactly where we’d left off – Alex was trapped in her own grave, Tom was whittling stakes, and Hal was awakening his newly slaughtered vampire army at a local pub. Of all the things I probably didn’t expect in the show’s last ever episode, I’d rate a musical number pretty high among them; but that was what we got, in a blackly funny scene as the bloodstained Hal danced around the bar singing ‘Puttin on the Ritz’, even while tapping his newfound recruits awake.

No that they lasted long, as Tom stormed in with stakes and phials of his own blood to put them back down in a Matrix-style action sequence that was pure brilliance before taking on Hal himself. Now that was a fight – kudos to director Daniel O’Hara for making the whole sequence so thrilling.

And that was just the first five minutes. This was a full throttle episode from the start, which still had plenty of room for depth and introspection even while not stinting on the action. Fortunately, Alex had figured out that she could walk through solid objects and escaped the grave (which, admittedly, did rather undercut last week’s cliffhanger), and was there in time to stop Hal and Tom killing each other. This was fortunate because, as she put it, “shit’s getting real out there.”

Indeed it was, as the newly revitalised Captain Hatch (aka Beelzebub) had been taking a stroll around Barry before heading off into the wider world. I’d been wondering what exactly the Devil was going to get up to if freed; it became clear that, as usual, he was going to start the Apocalypse.

Yes, not very original I know. But it’s hard to dislike Phil Davis when he gets his teeth into a part like this. No longer a decrepit cripple, he pranced around with a fedora and a bright yellow tie, muck to Rook’s surprise, before letting the stuffy civil servant in on the truth. And forcing some info out of him that would turn out to help him spread his suicide-inducing ways to a much wider audience.

The vision of the Apocalypse starting in a place as prosaic as Barry Island was strangely in keeping with this show’s familiar mix of the supernatural and the mundane. It looked a bit low-budget, with the devastation confined to a couple of car crashes and a few bloodied corpses on the eerily empty streets. But the sense of a wider catastrophe was cleverly introduced with a news broadcast of the suicide epidemic spreading to Cardiff as our heroes, forced to ally against the greater evil, learned from the shaking Rook the venue for the Final Confrontation. Hatch (aka Old Nick) was off to take control of the country’s emergency broadcast system and spread his message of doom to the whole of Britain.

Toby Whithouse has never been shy about… er, pilfering from writers he admires. Way back in series 3, that nail-biting confrontation between Nina and the revitalised Herrick (“You know, you were the only one who was kind to me? I think I’ll let you live.”) was taken almost verbatim from an old Alan Moore comic, Marvelman:

This time, in the first of several instances this episode, Whithouse managed another ‘homage’ to Moore; Hatch’s Address to the Nation was basically a rerun of the one from V for Vendetta: “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”

But his demonic broadcast was interrupted by the arrival of our heroes, intent on restaging the ritual from 1918, and getting it right this time – to destroy the Devil. Amusingly, Hatch cut to the old Potter’s Wheel interlude while he was otherwise engaged:

“I’ll be right back.”

And here was where the episode got really twisty-turny. “You haven’t told them the fine print, have you?” smirked Hatch to Evil Hal. The ritual – involving a ghost drinking the mixed blood of vampire and werewolf – would kill all three. Except Evil Hal was clever, and had snatched some blood from a dying vampire earlier – just the same way he’d escaped ‘alive’ in 1918.

No dice though – Tom and Alex were still up for it, provided Hal would kick the Devil’s arse next time he showed up. Which was when the Old Tempter pulled his greatest trick, living up to that particular nickname. All three of them found themselves placed – apart – with their greatest temptations.

For Alex, it was never having died, and being with her dad (Gordon Kennedy, marvellous as ever). For Tom, it was being free of his curse and living in Honolulu Heights with the now-pregnant Allison. And for Hal, it was being back in the Belarussian forest where he was turned 500 years ago, and having the choice to die a human, never inflicting his brand of slaughter on the world. For added guilt, Leo turned up to persuade him that his own murders were a direct result of Hal’s decision.

It was good to see both Louis Mahoney as Leo and Ellie Kendrick as Allison; their appearances were vital to the plot, rather than just the sort of fan-pleasing gesture that Doctor Who so frequently does. But Hatch, simultaneously appearing to all three (“I’m not omnipresent, but I can multi-task”) had missed the thing that was so vital to all of them – each other. His temptations didn’t work because he’d missed the bonds of friendship this year’s series has so convincingly established. And so they said no to the Devil, and were back in the Emergency Broadcast studio. With the original blood mix smashed on the floor, even Evil Hal was prepared to die to stop the Apocalypse.

The sequences of the trio being tempted were both funny and heart-rending, and beautifully played by Damien Molony, Michael Socha and Kate Bracken. It was a real punch the air moment as the three were intercut telling Hatch where to get off. As it was when Rook, now rehired by the Home Secretary (Whithouse in one last cameo) unexpectedly blew Hatch’s head off.

It seemed a bit unsatisfactory as an ending, Hal opining that the Devil had “dispersed into the atmosphere”. But it was the first in a series of false endings that kept us guessing throughout. In a nutshell – Rook turned up, turned out to be possessed by the Devil, was cast out by the ritual, which the gang unexpectedly survived, and was then killed by Hal, casting Satan out for good. And as Alex discovered that she’d laddered her tights, the truth became clear; with the Devil gone, so had all their curses. They’d wanted so much to be human – and now they were.

True, it seemed a little convenient. I could understand Hal and Tom going back to their human selves, but Alex? Being dead already, wouldn’t she just have shuffled off to the afterlife? Still, as the heroes got used to their newly human status (be careful what you wish for) and settled down, as ever to watch Antiques Roadshow, Whithouse sprang the final twist – the origami wolf (shades of Blade Runner) Hatch had left on the mantelpiece in Tom’s hallucination.

And that’s the ending he promised, that would keep us guessing. Did our heroes win, and get to live out natural lives as humans? Or are they still trapped in their greatest temptation, a happy life together, as the Devil spreads his Apocalypse through the world? What Mr Whithouse has done here is – he’s Inception’d us.

Yes, just as the end of Christopher Nolan’s mindbender (itself reminiscent of the original Total Recall) never definitively states if Leo DiCaprio has got back to the real world, so fans can take this ambiguous climax in the way that makes them happiest. If you want a happy ending, fine – they got one. If you wanted the heroes to perish while the world burned, fine – that might be just what happened. Something for everyone.

I can understand that some might find the ambiguity frustrating. But for me it was just right. I can come down on either side of the fence according to my mood! And in the end, this served perfectly to sum up the show’s continuing theme of what ‘being human’ really means. Even when they were ‘monsters’, as Hal pointed out, they were still ‘human’ – with all the flaws, possibilities and drive to improve that make us all human. A fitting capstone to five years of a show that will always be one of my favourites.

Being Human: Series 5, Episode 5 – No Care, All Responsibility

“You didn’t ask for help because you knew you’d get it. You didn’t want to be clean.” – Alex

In this penultimate episode of Being Human’s final series, things were expectedly ramping up as the year’s various ongoing plot strands came together. Mr Rook was still unwisely following the self-interested advice of Captain Hatch (aka Lucifer), and trying to promote supernatural conflict as a means of restoring his department’s funding. Having failed with last week’s aborted werewolf attack, he’d moved on to breaking up Hal and Tom’s friendship, forcing them into fighting.

Hal, meanwhile, was still struggling unsuccessfully against his blood addiction, while Alex, curious after Bobby’s unlikely suicide last week, was getting extremely suspicious of the sourfaced Hatch. And for a bit of light relief, Tom’s inner feelings were again being stirred towards romance.

As things are moving towards a climax, the balance was tilted more towards horror than humour this week. Even Tom’s newly discovered interest in the sins of the flesh, comical though it was, fed into the darkness of what was going on elsewhere. For it turned out that the young lady he had a crush in was actually an agent provocateur working for Rook, with a mission to torpedo our heroes’ happy home.

I must admit, I wasn’t too happy seeing Tom written as a comical imbecile again. Yes, he’s had a very sheltered upbringing, and I can believe (even after last year’s dalliance with Allison) that he’s still a virgin. I find it rather harder to believe that he would be so completely ignorant about “the birds and the bees” (which he took to mean ornithology when Hal mentioned the phrase).

Granted, McNair didn’t seem the type of chap to talk about women in anything more than old-fashioned terms of chivalry; but Tom lives in the normal world now, and he’d have to be astonishingly unobservant to have failed to pick up a few tips from today’s highly sexualised culture. Does he never pick up a magazine, or watch the TV? For that matter, has he never glanced at the front of Captain Hatch’s Daily Mail-alike newspaper? (Headline this week: “Is Health and Safety turning Britain’s Farmers Gay?”)

Be that as it may, the object of his desire, Natasha (capably played by Skins’ Kathryn Prescott) turned out to be a cuckoo in the nest. Eliciting Tom’s sympathy with a ‘damsel in distress’ turn which resulted in her getting a job at the Grand, she then surprised Hal by instantly spotting his withdrawal symptoms for what they were, and even more surprisingly offered herself as a blood supply.

Alex, who appears to be the most sensible of the gang, had her suspicions of Natasha from the start. And rightly so; she was the little girl rescued from vampires fifteen years previously by Rook, now working for him undercover. Getting Hal back on the blood was only a start, to be followed by sowing the seeds of discord between him and his werewolf best bud.

The ever-watchful Alex was quick to find out that the man who’d, effectively, caused her death was back to drinking that intoxicating red stuff – and she wasn’t happy. It was a payoff to the similar disillusionment suffered by Lady Mary a couple of weeks ago, as Alex too had been deluding herself that she was keeping her sharp-toothed friend on the straight and narrow. She even, this week, succumbed to her own feelings of romance, finally breaking the sexual tension between her and Hal with a kiss; though from experience of the trouble Annie and Mitchell had getting it on, she shouldn’t expect much more.

Not that she’s likely to want to now. Stumbling over the wretched Hal feeding off Natasha, she was disgusted enough to tell him to get out of the house. It felt like a truish depiction of addiction; as she commented, Hal could have asked for help easily enough, but like the true addict he was, didn’t want to give up that last possibility of another hit.

It’s worth remembering at this point that Being Human arose from Toby Whithouse’s attempt to do a less supernatural kind of sitcom, based around three characters who were agoraphobic (which became a ghost), had anger management issues (a werewolf) and was a sex addict. The last of these, obviously, was the one that morphed into a vampire; initially Mitchell and now Hal. The idea of blood being not sustenance but an addictive narcotic has always been central to the show’s idea of vampires, but it’s rarely been portrayed as closely to real drug addiction as it is here.

Very much in ‘suspicious’ mode this week, Alex also recruited her friends in her investigation of Hatch (sceptical though they were). This led to some actually rather tense moments – Alex doesn’t know what she’s taking on here, but we do. So I actually found myself shouting at the screen at one point – “Careful, Alex!”, as she tried to goad Hatch into revealing that he could see her.

Similar reactions were inspired as Tom stumblingly tried to read her questions from smudged biro on his hand – “what are your views on… the quilt?”, to Hatch’s contemptuous incomprehension. It was only a matter of time, of course, this being the penultimate episode, before Old Nick showed his true face. So it proved as Alex made another foolish attempt to provoke him, with no one else around.

With Tom having learned of Hal’s blood-drinking betrayal, and Hatch having conned Natasha into slashing her own throat to frame him, the vampire/werewolf fight was properly on, and it was made that much more effective and heartbreaking by the emphasis on Hal and Tom’s ‘bromance’ thus far in the series. So, it was a revitalised Hatch, his eyes glowing red, that Alex made the mistake of confronting in his shadowy hotel room. Rising shockingly from his wheelchair in a ‘punch the air’ moment, he roared in true Phil Davis style, “I’m the fuckin’ Devil, sweet’eart!” before waving a hand and banishing her to regions unknown.

Some audacious direction from Daniel O’Hara allowed us to share Alex’s plight, as the screen stayed black for what seemed like ages, the only sound Alex’s panicked breathing. Just as I wondered how long he’d let it play out, we got a bit of light from Alex’s penlight, revealing her to be in a shadowy cramped space with a rotting corpse. I figured it out just before the camera panned up for the big reveal; she’s trapped in her own grave. Nasty stuff indeed from writer Sarah Dollard, but I’m guessing Toby Whithouse will find a way of getting her out for next week’s last ever episode…

So, with Hatch ascendant, Alex trapped, Tom whittling a stake for his former best friend, and Evil Hal truly back and about to devour a diner full of customers, the stage is properly set for a big climax. This series’ shorter run of six episodes, like the first series, has allowed for less meandering than the show’s more frequent eight episode lengths; it’s been a more concentrated, intense ride. It’s also true that, as a consequence, the show has lost some of its depth, especially noticeable with its somewhat OTT comedy this year. But if this is to be the Final End for Being Human, this was a suitably nail-biting lead up to the Big Finale. Let’s hope Toby Whithouse can give the guys – and his concept – a fitting sendoff.

Being Human: Series 5, Episodes 2 & 3–Sticks and Ropes / Pies and Prejudice

“You’re too late. The end has begun. Night will fall. And.. he… will… RISE!”

Well lo and behold, a day after I wrote in my last review that Being Human had plenty of mileage left in it, BBC3 went and cancelled it! Low ratings, they said. Well, it’s bound to have low ratings if you sneak it on with virtually no pre-publicity and shift the HD showing (which lots of people including myself would rather watch) to a week later because of the football.

Commenting on the cancellation, showrunner Toby Whithouse said the series had “a definite end” but that it would “keep viewers guessing”, which to me sounds like two contradictory statements. Still, at least it means he’ll be free to take over Doctor Who when Steven Moffat steps down (fingers crossed). And it is fair to say that Being Human lost a lot of its fans with the loss of the original cast. Not everyone has warmed to the new gang the way I have.

Nor to its rather more broadbrush comedic style this year. In another bumper blog post to catch up with all the shows I missed reviewing while off in LA, I watched episodes 2 and 3 back to back yesterday, and found the same approach of mixing humour and horror that we saw in episode 1. For episode 2, written by Daragh Carville, the balance was once again about right, the darkness of the horror more than offsetting the silliness of the humour. Episode 3, for me at least, was rather less successful, highlighting some of the new gang’s basic implausibilities and saddled with a guest character that, no matter how good Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt may be, was very obviously a ripoff of Alan Partridge.

Sticks and Ropes, as the title indicates, was our first sight of the mysterious figures that Saul told Annie lurked in the afterlife, way back in series 2. There’s some truth in the old saw that this sort of thing might have been better left to the imagination; I’ve generally found that Being Human works better with sinister hints than actually showing its mythos. However, the Men With Sticks and Ropes were indeed finally seen, and actually they were pretty nasty. Led by a glowing eyed Martin Hancock (you may remember him from such soap operas as Coronation Street and Holby City), they were aided by some atmospheric lighting and direction from Philip John, which couldn’t quite avoid making them look like low-budget Cenobites. Nice try, though.

But before we got to them, it was time for more comedic fun at the Barry Grand Hotel, which is clearly going to be the major setting for this year (aside from Honolulu Heights, anyway). As we now know the Devil resides there in the form of repulsive pensioner Captain Hatch, things were getting “a bit suicidey”. So, with a little urging from Hatch himself, manager Patsy announced an Employee of the Month contest. Cue Hal and Tom bringing out their competitive sides in a series of fun skits, all of which were underlined by the fact that Hatch actually wants them competing with each other.

For as we learned in ep1, Hatch (ie the Devil) actually thrives on the energy generated by vampire/werewolf conflict, and this is his chance to escape from his incarceration in decrepitude. So, for all the broad comedy of Hal and Tom’s competition (sterilising the till keypad, food fights etc), things swiftly turned nasty with a bit of subtle goading from Hatch himself. “I’ve tried to be shit,” snarled Hal, “but you always find a way to be more shit!”

Since the show has established a (mostly) believable friendship between Hal and Tom, it was actually quite nasty to watch. It also showcased how good an actor Phil Davis is; Hatch may, on the surface, appear an unsubtle grotesque, but there was some clever stuff going on in the performance.

Given some alone time to goad Tom (a pretty gross scene as Tom had to clean him up after his colostomy bag burst), he wormed doubts into Tom’s mind with a broad Cockney accent, playing on his doubts about the ‘lordly’ Hal being his superior. When it was Hal’s turn to be manipulated, Davis took on a more cut glass accent, praising Hal’s florid vocabulary (“Meritocracy. That’s beautiful.”), and opining that there should always be a hierarchy.

It also gave him time to repeatedly allude to the Devil’s relationship with God (“I used to work with a bloke like him once. Stabbed me in the back. Threw me out.”) which is clever but still makes me uneasy about the theology. As I said in my review of ep1, if you accept that the Devil exists, you have to accept that God exists too, and for an atheist like me, that feels weird. And yet I have no problem with the show’s basic premise of vampires, werewolves and ghosts – perhaps because everyone accepts that they belong in the realm of fantasy. Funny, isn’t it?

Of course, that might be because Mr Rook is so good at his job. We caught up with him too, as he continued to try and save his funding from the pompous Home Secretary (Toby Whithouse himself, in an amusingly stuffy performance). Rook’s plan, actually, didn’t make a whole lot of sense; bring in the sister (and, as it turned out, niece) of twitchy new vampire Crumb and let him devour them, then show it to his boss as evidence of what he was dealing with. It came as no surprise that the Home Secretary didn’t consider two deaths a viable justification for increasing public funding. Perhaps Whithouse is straying into Yes Minister territory.

Still, it was good to see Steven Robertson back as the prim Rook, and Colin Hoult is marvellous as Crumb. He’s a simultaneously amusing and scary portrayal of, as he puts it, what happens when “the victim gets superpowers”. Plainly wracked by blood withdrawal, much like Hal in ep1, he still managed to find time to bang on about his favourite role play game, which, as it turned out, Rook’s disillusioned young assistant also liked. Which was the cue for yet another swerve between humour and horror when Crumb acceded to his request to be “recruited”.

Alex, meanwhile, was dealing with the unexpected appearance of a new ghost at Honolulu Heights – an irritating spoiled brat from the Edwardian era called Oliver, who claimed to have died there as a child. This too swerved between funny and chilling, as Oliver revealed that he’d killed himself from guilt at seeing his crippled little brother drown. It also turned out to be a part of Hatch’s plan; Oliver had been put there to bring out the Men With Sticks and Rope when his Door appeared.

Alex managed to avoid that by getting him through the Door and closing it, as the Men With Sticks and Rope couldn’t survive on our side. But there were some dire warnings, along with the revelation that the Men work for Hell itself – the first indication we’ve had that there’s a worse afterlife in Being Human than Limbo, and again playing very much into the realm of Christian mythology.

This was a very busy episode, capped with a truly nasty scene in which Hatch basically explained his entire plan for our benefit; it might have been unsubtle exposition, but it was intercut with Hatch causing hotel manager Patsy to slowly die in front of us, blood streaming from every orifice until he finally gently suggested she wash herself in the sea. Nasty. He also revealed that, while he liked vampire/werewolf conflict, he didn’t like the idea of them also having a ghost friend, making a Trinity. Definitely Christian mythology there.

With so many of this year’s ongoing plotlines weaving together, it could have been an overcrowded episode. But in fact it was far more entertaining than the more simple one that followed. Pies and Prejudice stuck to a more simple A plot/B plot formula; in the A plot, Tom fell under the spell of incompetent werewolf and former Partridge-like weatherman Larry Chrysler (Julian Barratt), while in the B plot, Alex caught a glimpse of her future with another of Hal’s ghostly victims, the misleadingly prim and proper Lady Mary (Amanda Hale).

Unlike the previous ep, there wasn’t much in the way of actual horror here, which left the broad comedy looking a bit one-note. I like Julian Barratt, and this kind of role is very much his forte, but it was so transparently Alan Partridge it felt like cheap writing. Plus, we were back to Tom being written as an impressionable idiot rather than a naive innocent; it’s a subtle distinction, but one that writer Jamie Mathieson has managed to avoid in previous episodes.

It was fun seeing Lady Mary’s transformation from genteel 19th century lady to modern party girl as soon as Hal turned his back, and underlined the episode’s general point about the lies people tell each other and themselves. He was under the impression that she was a relic from another age (much like himself), while she was under the impression she’d been keeping him from killing for 200 years. Both were wrong. In one sense at least, that was clever writing, as it echoes the Jane Austen novel whose title the episode puns on.

Still, the ep gave Mathieson a chance to give a bit more welcome depth to Alex’s character, as she visited her family to see them moving on without her and resolved to let them get on with their lives. She also got to see, in Lady Mary, what she could become if she stayed Earthbound for too long; an aimless shade reduced to seeking pleasure by feeding on the sensations of sad clubbers shagging in toilets.

No sign of Hatch or Crumb this time, but we did briefly catch up with Mr Rook, as he contemplated suicide after pouring out his troubles to what turned out to be a phone sex line. And Hal was forced to turn to Rook after his fury at Larry for turning Tom into a sobbing wreck drove him to murder. Again, we got the sense of a very strong friendship between Hal and Tom, and it was affectingly played by both Damian Molony and Michael Socha as Hal gently tried to coax him back to the house. Still, isn’t it a little soon after the death of his previous best friend to be telling Tom, “you’re the best man I’ve ever known”?

Of course, the friendship between Hal and Tom, however different they are, is integral to the group’s chemistry. But I also have a feeling, given how strongly it’s being emphasised, that it’s going to be a vital plot point at some point this series.

For all that, I found the arc-heavy, slightly overcrowded Sticks and Ropes a more enjoyable episode than the more straightforward comedy of Pies and Prejudice. Even if it is a mixed bag this year (and hasn’t it always been?), I do still love this show though, even with its new characters. I shall miss it when it’s gone. Though I still have the American version to watch, which is very much its own beast now, and every bit as watchable.